Where to rest in Reston?

Since we had not seen Tafanie, Cory and Isabella since February, we decided to spend a couple of weeks in Reston, Virginia, to visit with them before heading up further into New England and Canada. 

Reston is located just west of Washington, DC.  As we are finding out with most big cities, the choice of campgrounds is usually few and expensive.  This is especially true around the DC area.  Our choices of campgrounds closest to Reston were Bull Run and Lake Fairfax campgrounds.

When we were here for 2 weeks last year when Isabella was born, we stayed at Bull Run Campground, a state owned park.  While Bull Run has full hookups available, the services are many times difficult to reach, and many of the sites are not level.  Plus, Bull Run is about a 30-35 minute drive from their apartment.  The nightly cost at Bull Run is $41.50.

Last fall, on the way back from our trip to the RV-Dreams Rally in Hershey, PA, we stayed at Lake Fairfax.  Lake Fairfax has level sites and is only about 10 minutes from their apartment, but only has 50 AMP electric but no water and no sewer.  The campground does have a dumping station and a place to fill up with potable water at no extra charge.  The nightly cost at Lake Fairfax is $45. 

Because we knew we could do our laundry and take showers at their apartment and because Pa and MiMa (Chuck and I) wanted to spend as much time with Isabella and Tafanie and Cory, we decided to stay at Lake Fairfax.  I called to reserve a site and got site A-5.

The drive between Rustburg and Reston took about 4 1/2 hours.  We traveled US-29 rather than an interstate, because I-81 was too far out of the way.  The trip between Rustburg and Charlottesville, VA, was not bad because it is not as populated and there were not many traffic lights.  But the closer we got to Reston, the worse it got.  The traffic lights were more and more frequent and the traffic worse.  When you're driving a 33,000 pound RV towing a 3,500 pound car, traffic and traffic lights can wear you out.  I think Chuck would rather drive 500 miles of interstate driving as to drive 100 miles of stop-n-go driving.

After checking in, the first thing we had to do was fill up with potable water.  We did not get it completely full because we were parked on a slope, but we hoped it would be enough to last for 2 weeks.  We got set up as quickly as we could and then headed straight to see:

Isabella!